Create a Staging Site

This article will show you how to create a staging site in your Rochen cPanel account.

What is a Staging Site?

A staging site allows you to duplicate your live site (e.g. rochenrocks.com) to a staging location (e.g. staging1.rochenrocks.com), make changes, or test new themes or modules, then push those changes seamlessly back to the live site.

Staging sites are particularly useful for web design agencies or developers as they ensure no interruptions to the live website. But they are also easy enough for any user to create and are an excellent tool for individuals managing their own personal or small business websites.

In your Rochen cPanel account, you can create a Staging site via Softaculous. 

Logging in to cPanel & Finding Softaculous

1. Log in to your Rochen cPanel account. You can access cPanel via the following methods in your browser: 
   1. https://yourdomain.com:2083
   2. https://yourserver.directrouter.com:2083

Create a staging site

1. Now that you’re logged in to your cPanel account, it’s time to create a staging site. Scroll down until you see the Softaculous Apps Installer as pictured below, and click on any icon. 
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2. Go to the top right and click on the file box icon, as pictured below: 
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3. Now you should see any existing installations listed. 
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4. Click on the Staging icon.
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5. Now you are provided with some optional settings. Your staging site will need to be installed into its own directory. Choose a directory name and enter it in the box, or leave the default. For this example, we chose to name our directory dev. 
6. You will also have the option to choose a database name. We left the automatically generated name of “drup864” for this example.
7. You can also edit the cron settings. However, if you’re not familiar with cron jobs, we recommend leaving the default. Or open a ticket to ask for advice/assistance. 
8. Now click the Create Staging button. 
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9. All done! Now know how to create a staging site! 
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10. Now you can use your staging site to test modules and themes, make code changes, etc. When you’re ready to, you can clone your dev site back to your root to override the live site and put your dev changes in place. 

Please note: In some rare cases, if you are using a script/plugin that uses hard-coded pathing, you may need to manually update the associated configuration file(s) to reference your new install. If you log in to your account over SSH and change directories to your install, you can use a command like “grep -Ri ‘<oldpath>’ ~+” (where <oldpath> is your original site location) to look for any files that may require adjustment. Please open a support ticket with us if you encounter any difficulties and need some assistance with this.